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Topic: The new funding inititive for QT5 from VOICE. (Read 1763 times)

I have been playing with Otter and Quipzilla. Either one of those two browsers seem promising Quipzilla is a little more mature than Otter. But I like both. They should mature to be good Firefox and Seamonkey replacements. I think the effort is worth it.

I just like emphasize again that this funding campaign was started October last year. Its true it was not clear 100% at he time which direction it would go. The QT based browser was the most likely candidate. VOICE started collecting funding for BWW early as it was expected this would be a big effort to get this project moving. And why should we always be late at the party as a community!

Some people where not happy with this direction. Dmitry from Bitiwise works looked in some of the options and QT based browser seems to be the best approach. Do not forgot that the guys at working on porting code AND have to do this research in parallel what direction to take. This is the reason it took time to make the QT roadmap. It again extremely important to understand that which browser we choose is not the primary point of discussion at this time as 85% to 90% a QT based browsers is "tadaa" coming out of the the QT libraries.

Firefox has had its best days. The following email is quoted from Dmitry from bww bitwiseworks GmbH:

"Many years of developing Firefox for OS/2 (since version 10 when it was officially dropped by everybody and bww bitwiseworks GmbH picked it up, till the latest version 49) proved that this project is too overwhelming for a small group of OS/2 developers that we have nowadays. The Firefox source code is a huge mess of everything — third party libraries, new components developed from scratch by various groups of people inside the Mozilla corporation, old parts coming from Netscape times. Firefox contains a dozen thousand source files. The Mozilla corporation has 1000+ employees working on the components of the Mozilla infrastructure that Firefox is made of. It's simply not possible any more to bear its complexity with our small developer's community. Its not possible to do this in a reasonable amount of time and stay in line with the Mozilla mainstream development progress.

For this reason it was decided to stop spending time and money on porting a project whose quality cannot be guaranteed on OS/2 any more. More over, there are alternatives. The most interesting one is Qt software development framework version 5 that among other things contains the web browser sub-module based on the Google's Chromium engine (the same one used in the popular Chrome browser). Having Qt 5 and its web browser sub-module ported to OS/2 will give us not only a number of Qt-based web-browsers but also a whole bunch of Qt-based applications for various purposes. We have a port of Qt 4 to OS/2 but it's became very old and most Qt applications moved to Qt 5 long ago. Also having the Chromium ported to OS/2 will open doors to having a port of Chrome to OS/2 if the need arises."

Anyway that is summary from Dmitry and I think he is the best guy we have for the job to know what he is talking about. He has been busy porting Firefox for years and he knows a lot about OS/2.

A Qt based browser sounds a good solution because if I understood right, when Qt is ported to OS/2, the porting of available Qt based browsers is reasonably "easy" at least compared to Firefox. And when Qt5 is available for OS/2 it's also possible to port other Qt5 based software as well.

But porting Qt5 takes a long time. Is there any predictions how long it will be supported after Qt6 comes out? I've used a Qt based KDE desktop in Linux since 1998 and during these years Qt libraries and the KDE have seen many updates and usually older KDE version has become unsupported after the newer Qt version has been released. I was just wondering would it be wiser to port upcoming Qt6 instead?

I tested out HaikuOS beta that came out recently (the open-source clone of another great OS from the past) and it had QT5 and various browsers. Now I'm really convinced that portin QT5 is the way to go - the Firefox OS/2 build seems very sluggish compared to those QT5 browsers that were available in HaikuOS.